ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in addressing and reconfiguring suffering, attention must be paid to how negative affect might be evoked as a healing modality. It shows how negative affect can be reclaimed rather than repressed, and explores what kinds of ontological transformations this might offer. The chapter analyses how engaging with suffering as unhappy forms of affect can be both the solution to and the site of suffering, concurrently. It focuses on how a group healing method, Family Constellation Therapy (FCT), seeks to heal its subjects' senses of suffering and trauma by intentionally intervening into its participants' pre-cognitive and pre-subjective states. FCT is an alternative therapeutic method developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger in the 1980s. The research on FCT practices was gathered as part of a subfield of Dragojlovic's ethnographic research on memory and genealogy work conducted in the Netherlands. Annelies was among the first participants to raise her hand to have her question constellated.
